1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to an approximate pyramidal search for fast displacement matching between images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Searching for the best matching patch between two arrays of image data is a common problem in image processing. For example, many stereoscopic imaging systems compute the disparity between left and right images by finding a two-dimensional (2D) patch in the right image that best matches a given 2D patch in the left image. In another example, the alignment of two three-dimensional (3D) point clouds may be accomplished by searching for the best 3D patch matches between the volumes. In another example, video compression algorithms may determine motion between two consecutive images using an optical flow algorithm that matches patches between the two images.
A coarse-to-fine resolution pyramid approach is often used for such matching. In general, in a pyramid approach, an initial search is performed at a lower resolution than the original images and the search result is refined at one or more higher resolutions. The number of resolution levels in the search pyramid is implementation dependent. The use of a pyramidal search approach has been shown to be faster and more tolerant to local minima that an exhaustive search at high resolution.